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Unseen museum treasures to go on display

A total of ten items will be featured in the First Time Out exhibition at venues across the country, including several in the capital.

Each of the participating venues will unveil an artefact from its archives which has never previously been available for public viewing. The objects will be redistributed once among the ten venues halfway through the exhibition period.

London’s Royal Botanical Gardens will display a page from Charles Darwin’s rarest work, Letters on Geology, a collection of extracts from correspondence sent to Professor John Stevens, his mentor at Cambridge.

Cigar holder for the coronation of King Ludwig II of BavariaCredit: Science Museum/Wellcome Library

The letters shed light on the author’s earliest observations which eventually led to the theories outlined in his most famous book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The item will also be shown at The Lightbox in Woking, Surrey.

Other pieces to go on display will include the first light bulb, the Incandescent Electric Lamp, designed by Joseph Swan in 1881, and the first light switch created by John H. Holmes in 1884. They will be displayed at Newcastle’s Discovery Museum and the Science Museum in London.

The Peterborough Museum will host a model guillotine made from animal bones by prisoners of the Napoleanic Wars. The museum has the largest public collection of war prisoner craftwork in the world, currently holding over 700 items.

London’s Natural History Museum will display the skull of a rough-toothed dolphin, a species that lives deep in tropical waters. The skull, believed to date back to 1850, has been decorated with ink by sailors, who were known to spend their days at sea decorating the bones and teeth from their catches.

“First Time Out is a disarmingly simple idea which opens up complicated questions about the millions of intriguing artefacts looked after by museums and galleries behind closed doors. At its heart are ten fascinating objects whose value is held in the different stories we tell about them,” said Ken Arnold, head of public programmes at Wellcome Collection.

“We hope that visitors, wherever they see the project, and however many pieces they see, will participate in extending this creative exchange before the objects return to their archives,” he added.

Horniman Museum and Gardens: Ceremonial mask of Dzunuḵ̓wa or “Wild woman of the woods” from the Northwest Coast of Canada (c. 1900) - displayed in collaboration with U'mista Cultural Centre, Alert Bay, British Columbia

Royal Shakespeare Company: Fool’s bauble, a prop for the RSC Production of King Lear (2007) with Sir Ian McKellen as King Lear and Sylvester McCoy as the fool